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The fifth FR-series book not only returned to the geography of the Realms, but returned to presenting an area that had already gotten a boost from the rest of the line. It was also a return to “The North” of FR1’s Waterdeep and the North. The latter had given some information on the region, but without proper maps, it hadn’t been very useful. Finally, The Crystal Shard had been a hit early Forgotten Realms novel, making this region supplement highly anticipated. It has continued to be a popular region, seeing more Drizzt novels, the Neverwinter games, and further supplements such as Volo’s Guide to the North and the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide.

The Savage Frontier is typical of the series as 64-page book with a faux parchment pattern on the pages, a detached trifold cover, and two poster-sized maps. The maps are in the usual 30 miles/inch ‘small’ scale, and join up north of the ones in the original campaign set, covering from a bit south of Waterdeep to the Spine of the World mountains (a somewhat convenient straight east-west mountain chain that defines the northern boundary of livable land), with the main map reaching from The Great Desert in the east to the coast in the west. The coast runs further west near the north, forcing a second map for the last four inches of land, leaving most of that map to be left to ocean, with some fairly major islands scattered about. One quarter of the map is used for insets, including a northern extension to the bit of land in the corner of this map, showing Icewind Dale, as well as a couple location maps. The cover includes a repeat of the main Waterdeep map, and five other locations, making this the first FR book to not leave at least one panel empty.

Region the FR5 maps cover, showing the overlap with the gray box and FR2’s detail maps.

The book is supposedly written by an in-universe character, Amelior Amanitas of Secomber, though this is generally limited to humorous little intros and outros to chapters, and does not affect the main text. (It is also worth noting that he is originally from DQ1 The Shattered Statue, also by Paul Jaquays, which does happen in Cormyr, despite getting no Forgotten Realms logos.) It starts with a two page history, goes on to an overview talking of trade, climate, major factions, and the various peoples of the region. There is then six chapters of geographical description, broken up somewhat oddly. The first one is just cities and towns and the like, and is in a smaller font as well as based off of the similar chapter from FR1 (I don’t think any description is exactly the one from that book, but they’re often about 80% the same). There’s a separate chapter for ‘lost lands, strongholds, & ruins’, each with their own subchapter, then one on pure geographical features (mountains, rivers, etc.), and then a chapter just on the High Forest, which is something of a central focus of the book. And, towards the beginning of all this, is a chapter on the islands, folding all of their towns and geographical features together. So part of the description of the area is broken up by type of feature, and part of it by region. It’s obvious enough to not interfere with looking things up, but it is a bit grating, and presumably partly caused by the reuse of material from FR1.

Overall, a fair amount of attention is given to barbarians in this book. I’m not sure if it was seen as TSR’s best chance at showing how the backgrounds for that character class should work, or what, but there’s a lot here. In the section on the various peoples of the North, the Uthgardt barbarians get five pages, going into detail about various tribes, the broad outlines of society, special shaman powers, and the like. Also, the Northmen (more of the Norse-analogues from FR2, who can be barbarians) get two pages, while everything else (aarakocra, dwarves, orcs, trolls, etc… aaand the barbarians of Icewind Dale) gets two pages. And then there’s a three-page chapter on the ancestor mounds of the various Uthgardt tribes. Three of the location maps are actually of these, one showing ‘typical’ ones, one is an adventure one, and one is… atypical. What makes all this coverage work is that the barbarians are not all the same, and each has it’s own attitudes, from the extremely conservative, to tribes that are settling down and farming and becoming ‘civilized’, to one that is completely under the thumb of devils from Hellgate Keep.

The final chapter of the book is three pages outlining various prominent people, including, of course, the main trio from The Shattered Shard, and another refugee from a different Jaquays project, I12 The Egg of the Phoenix (which, no, is not a Forgotten Realms adventure, he’s been exiled here). And then there’s four appendices in the last four pages, with some new magic items (including a minor artifact), a new non-weapon proficiency, an expansion of one from the Wilderness Survival Guide (plant lore, including a handy table of medicinal plants of the region), a year’s worth of events and rumors (Year of Shadows/DR 1358, the year considered ‘just beginning’ in the original set), and six adventure ideas.

I consider this product one of the highlights of the the FR series, and certainly the best one to this point. Moonshae has mood without detail, Empires of the Sands lacks mood while providing detail. Waterdeep and the North suffers (just a bit) from the chapter on the North that is unusable thanks to the lack of maps. This is a well-rounded supplement that stands well on its own, and you could run games here without ever getting the main boxed set.

Module I14 Swords of the Iron Legion sits at a crossroads of Dungeons and Dragons: It is the last of the fabled “I” series modules. It is an early Forgotten Realms adventure. It is a set of BattleSystem scenarios.

In all, it’s a disappointing note for the I series to go out on.

In form, it is a slightly large adventure module: 64-pages with a detached cover. The contents are a collection of eight loosely-connected adventures, plus three pure BattleSystem scenarios. All the adventures have a common general background, and are supposed to happen in sequence… an unspecified time apart. While it is mentioned that you could run them as part of a campaign, there is no support for actually doing so. This is an anthology, with each adventure written by a separate author, and it shows, with different styles, amounts of information given, and pretty close to zero linking between adventures (one NPC shows up in two of the adventures, with no acknowledgement of this fact). Also, the recommended level for the PCs goes up by about two each time, meaning that the DM of a campaign would have to find something for the PCs to do each time before steering them towards the next battle/adventure from the module.

All of this is set around the Vilhon Reach, in parts of Turmish and Chondath, an area that would not get any further exploration for years. There’s not a lot said about the region in the module, though a few things do come up. A nice touch is a reproduction of the appropriate area of the poster maps from the Campaign Setting box set on the interior cover. The cover also has the map for the climatic battle of the series, and a chart of all monster types encountered in the module.

As a set of BattleSystem combats, they’re not too bad, the scenarios start out small, though maybe not as simple as could be desired, and move up in scale and scope from there. The three ‘firefights’ (pure BattleSystem combats) are relatively small, and while uncredited, also suffer from uneven writing. Sadly, while there’s good tabular stats for all the units in each battle, the commanders (needed for each unit, plus possibly brigade and army commanders) are all buried in the text. Now, the PCs should be taking part, often as commanders at various levels, but it would much better to display the basics for these too. (And in some places, including one of the firefights, I don’t see the commander info at all.)

As AD&D adventures, any one of them could be dropped into a campaign, some with more trouble than others. At that point, their success will largely depend on having a group that wants to go adventuring and likes the idea of commanding a small body of troops enough to want to play out a miniatures battle at the end of the adventure. A rare breed in my experience. My initial thought when seeing this module was that it would be the adventures of the commanders of a mercenary company as they accept various contracts, so that miniatures combat would be part of the buy-in to the campaign. I still think that’s a workable idea, and would lead to a much more cohesive module than this collection of battles that normal adventurers just happen to stumble into (and given the original Campaign Set outlined a number of mercenary companies, a reasonably obvious one).

Fine, but you still have the bare bones of a Vilhon Reach campaign that a DM could flesh out into something workable, right? Well….

The biggest problem with these adventures as a set, is that they all have a supposed common thread, they’re all part of the machinations of a daemon who’s using this fighting to further goals elsewhere, and it is all invisible to the players. Even the final climatic battle isn’t designed to let the PCs in on what’s happening. They get briefly told that this one daemon that they’ve never heard of (though they might have encountered him disguised) has been instigating wars to get souls to power a doomsday machine. No big discovery, just a bit of background info-dump. And the info-dump isn’t even complete or entirely correct (more invisible machinations).

The main feeling I would imagine a party feeling after the final adventure is frustration. I think some of the other adventures are worth a look, though I don’t know that I’d want to run any of them ‘straight’. But it’s just a nice idea, with some good production (I really like the combined monster statistics table), and a severely lacking execution.

After covering two areas that were already developed, the third FR-series module went off into new territory: the South. The area had of course shown up in the original boxed set, and had gotten a number references in FR1 Waterdeep (as its primary trading rivals are all down there), but there’s no sense that it had ever been a major focus of Ed Greenwood’s campaign, and there were no novels like Darkwalker on Moonshae set there. Part of the area covered would be covered again in Lands of Intrigue, and the rest in Empires of the Shining Sea (both which included areas outside the scope of this product) and one section in particular would achieve fame with Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn.

Physically, it’s a typical TSR product of the time; a 64-page 8.5″x11″ book with a color cover. Like with Moonshae, there’s nothing on the inside cover, and the cover is detached from the main book, but that’s because there’s two 30-mile per inch poster maps wrapped around the book (one can fit in the middle of the book, but two would be too thick). As such, it is a much more expansive supplement than either Moonshae (which occupied about half of one map) or Waterdeep (which concentrated on a single city), and that presents some problems.

The main book is divided into three main sections for the three countries in the area covered: Amn, Tethyr, and Calimshan. Inside of each section, there’s a quick overview of the country, talking about general cultural quirks, languages spoken, what races are present and the like. The longest section tends to be a description of the various prominent cities (and towns) of the country. Scott Haring stated that it was his intent that each place can serve as as inspiration for an adventure, and this largely works. There’s no ‘typical town, population x’ entries here. Many may not inspire the type of adventure a DM is looking for right now, but some will, and there’s always something.

Region the FR3 maps cover, showing the overlap with the gray box’s detail maps.

The real problem is there’s no focus to the book at all. Each country gets about the same page count (they are all about the same size), and no particular city gets any sort of detailed look. There are also sections on places and people of interest, and these do tend to more detail. Castle Spulzeer gets one of the longest description in the book (and a map) at a bit over half a page. There’s two other maps, one a diagram of a cave complex near the described location, and the other is of the Plaza of Divine Truth in Calimport (which does have the longest description at over a page). Never is the general layout, or surrounding area, of a city shown.

In the center of the book are eight character sheets, and smaller reproductions of the poster maps (in black-and-white). Sadly, this last is the victim of the obligatory layout disaster of the book. The southern map is fine, but on the opposite side of the sheet, one part of the northern map (coasts and rivers) is rotated from the other, making it useless. Seven of the character sheets are pre-filled out with the details of the ‘Company of Eight’ (yes), an NPC group that’s not really described well enough for the DM to know well. The eighth is a blank Forgotten Realms-themed sheet that looks good, but because the book is done in the usual dark brown ink on faux-parchment pattern is difficult to reproduce well (and a few dark info boxes are impossible to photocopy usably).

The south is a much richer place than the north, with several cities larger than Waterdeep, up to the city of Calimport at 2 million (which I think is a bit much; Rome at its height was 1 million, and I’m not aware of any million+ cities in say the Middle East or Persia through the Middle Ages). While some of this it mentioned about in the overall descriptions, there’s no rules/pricing tie-ins given.

In general, it’s meant to be more of an Arabian/Middle-East themed setting, but this is not well supported in the text either. Amn is a stable merchant-dominated state (supposedly meant to have a Andalucia feel to it; I’d think more pre-Crusade Palestine coast), Tethyr has recently lost it’s royal family in bloody coup, and there’s currently no central authority (that feels more like Andalucia to me), and Calimshan is one of the wealthiest nations around, though the central authority is weak.

Calimshan was supposed to have a more Arabian Nights feel, and this actually comes through better, as the past history involves much of the area having been colonized by humanoids from the Elemental Plane of Air. In fact, it’s the one with the best developed history (outlined back 7000 years). In many ways, this feels like it should be the focus of the book, since there’s bigger hooks, that could have interesting consequences, but Calimshan gets the same page count as the other two countries. Also, Al-Qadim would come along and become the ‘Arabian Nights area’ of the Forgotten Realms, forcing a rewrite of Calimshan.

It is by no means a bad module, and if you like maps (I do!) it’s got those. And it does generate a lot adventuring possibilities. But it is unfocused, spread across a much larger area than anything other than the original boxed set (which was focused on Cormyr and the Dales). It’s not a bad module for an inventive DM, nor a bad place to visit, but basing a campaign anywhere in the area would take a lot more work.